PastMaster: Reshaping History – Details, episodes & analysis

Ur, Mesopotamia, 2100 BCE. The cradle of civilisation. The birthplace of writing, agriculture, and organised religion. Nick Horseman has been sent here as "Barry Smith" with one goal: cause as much mayhem as possible and die in the most spectacular fashion he can manage. Welcome to the Death Wish Speed Run. Nick chose Mesopotamia specifically because he knows nothing about it — "I've heard of ancient Mesopotamia and that's pretty much it" — and doesn't want to waste an era he might actually enjoy later. His strategy for achieving the fastest, most spectacular game over in PastMaster history targets the most sacred site in the city: the Ziggurat of Ur. What follows involves desecration, creative theology, and a claim about mystical excrement that somehow keeps the priests talking when they should be executing him. The question isn't whether Barry Smith dies. It's how many prompts he can stretch it to before he does. Ancient Ur was one of the world's first great cities, a centre of trade, religion, and early law. The Sumerians invented cuneiform, built ziggurats to their gods, and established some of humanity's earliest legal codes. None of which prepared them for Barry Smith. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Ancient | 2100 BCE | Ur, Mesopotamia Featuring: Nick Horseman — rapper and comedian (The Rhyme Scheme, Edinburgh Fringe 2019) EPISODE LINKS Follow Nick's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Nick on X 👉 @rociouspun Nick's website 👉 opencomedy.com/nickhorseman GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before the Big Bang. Before atoms. Before the laws of physics even bothered to show up. The Thots TV team are back, this time with DeepSeek as Game Master, and they've been sent to the most impossible location in PastMaster history: The Void. Their character? A "heat-resistant" Danny Dyer. Their mission? Survive in a place where literally nothing exists. Not even a decent boozer. DeepSeek calls them "either a genius or a lunatic. Maybe both." Danny Dyer's plan for pre-Big Bang survival involves confronting the void with East End directness, which goes about as well as you'd expect when the void can invent new laws of physics on the spot just to teach you a lesson. From there it's a whistle-stop tour through the Garden of Eden and Ming Dynasty China, each scenario more unhinged than the last, with DeepSeek delivering consequences that make Claude look lenient. This episode spans approximately 13.8 billion years of history in one sitting. It also marks DeepSeek's debut as Game Master — a Chinese AI that delivers consequences with surprising sass. Whether Danny Dyer's void strategy or the Garden of Eden pub search is the more ambitious plan is a question only the listener can answer. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Fiction | 13.8bn BCE - 1500 CE | The Void / Garden of Eden / Beijing, China Featuring: Thots TV podcast (Elsie Loades, Laura Connolly, Megan Mumby) EPISODE LINKS Follow Thots TV's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Elsie on X 👉 @ElsieLoades Laura on Instagram 👉 @lauraconnolly98 GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In true PastMaster style we're turning back the clock to revisit the past. In this case, our own podcasting past. In this episode from Season 2, Tan travels back to the slums of Victorian Whitechapel in a bid to catch Jack the Ripper and solve one of the most notorious unsolved crimes ever. If AI has access to all the knowledge in history, could it spot patterns in the data that mere humans have missed? Will GameMaster have a convincing theory as to who Jack the Ripper was? And can Tan actually convince Chief Inspector Fred Abberline that he is from the future, or will he make himself a suspect? PastMaster will return on the 16th of December for our first Christmas Special. Get ready for us to meddle with beloved Christmas history. And looking further ahead, where hard at work on Season 4, dropping in the new year. PastMaster is the time-travel role-playing adventure show where Ryan, Keon and Tan explore a different era of history in each episode with the help of our maverick AI GameMaster. Instagram 👉 ⁠@PastMasterPod⁠ (check out our AI-generated art illustrating what our adventures might have looked like) Twitter 👉 ⁠@PastMasterAI⁠ TikTok 👉 ⁠@PastMasterAI⁠ Gmail 👉 ⁠pastmasterpod@gmail.com⁠ Sign up to our newsletter 👉 ⁠www.pastmaster.ai Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Palos de la Frontera, Spain, 1492. Christopher Columbus is about to set sail for the New World, and Ryan has joined the crew with one objective: convince everyone on board that he is, in fact, a deity. His strategy? Be extremely stylish and tell everybody to wash their hands. Recorded live at the Cheerful Earful Podcast Festival. If you were dropped into the past with advanced knowledge of future events, could you use it to convince people you were divine? Ryan reckons the answer is yes, provided you lean into the showmanship. The live audience also gets a bonus round where they collectively attempt to "bake a gun" in revolutionary France, which is exactly the kind of audience participation that justifies a festival ticket. Columbus's first voyage changed the course of world history — three ships departing the Spanish coast for what turned out to be the Americas, not the East Indies. The crew were superstitious, mutiny was a constant risk, and anyone displaying unusual knowledge would either be worshipped or thrown overboard. Ryan's betting on worship. The crew have not yet formed an opinion. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Special | 1492 CE | Palos de la Frontera, Spain EPISODE LINKS Follow Ryan's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Philadelphia, 1775. Colonial America is on the brink of declaring independence, the Founding Fathers are assembling, and Ryan, as the ever-reliable "Ryanardo," has arrived with two goals: amend the Constitution before it gets written, and get his face carved onto Mount Rushmore. The first is noble. The second is unhinged. Both are very PastMaster. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson are all present. Ryan's plan involves whispering about equal rights to men who own slaves, pitching constitutional amendments two centuries early, and generally trying to insert himself into the founding of a nation. Also, Dolly Parton is here, for reasons that are never fully explained. The Game Master hasn't even questioned it. The Continental Congress of 1775 was the beginning of the American experiment — a gathering of colonial representatives who would go on to write the Declaration of Independence and, eventually, the Constitution. Philadelphia was the nerve centre, and the men in the room would become the most mythologised figures in American history. Ryan's trying to join that club. Whether the Founding Fathers are ready for a British time traveller with progressive politics and an unexplained country singer is the question. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Renaissance | 1775 CE | Philadelphia, United States EPISODE LINKS Follow Ryan's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Athens, 355 BCE. The cradle of Western philosophy, the birthplace of democracy, and the current location of a man who is simultaneously one of history's greatest thinkers and an absolute unit on the wrestling mat. Tan's been sent back to find Plato and answer a question that's haunted humanity for millennia: was Atlantis real? The only person who might know is a philosopher who got his name from his wrestling coach because of his broad shoulders. The mission: find Plato, earn his trust, and get him to reveal the truth about the lost civilisation he described in Timaeus and Critias. The problem is that Plato is a formidable adversary on every front — a man who literally invented the method for winning arguments and who can also wrestle you to the ground while asking you to define what "ground" really means. Keon provides helpful context from the sidelines: the Klaxons had a song about Atlantis. "Great song, great album, Mercury-winning." Ancient Athens was the intellectual capital of the world — a city where questioning everything was a way of life and every conversation could turn into a philosophical trap. Claude AI runs the Game Master, and the question is whether it can solve a mystery any better than ChatGPT. Tan's navigating a philosopher who treats every interaction as a Socratic dialogue. Getting answers out of Plato is hard enough. Getting them without a wrestling match is harder. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Ancient | 355 BCE | Athens, Greece EPISODE LINKS Follow Tan's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Three eras. Three players. One brutally unforgiving AI. Claude has been given a prompt demanding full realism, and the result is PastMaster's hardest episode yet — so hard there was time for three cracks at it, because nobody lasted long enough to fill a full episode. Welcome to Hard Mode 3.0: Hard Claude with a Vengeance. Keon heads to Victorian England armed with Downton Abbey clips. Tan gets dropped into the Aztec Empire at the height of its power. Ryan revisits a classic mission: taking out Hitler in 1911 Vienna before he rose to power. Claude is considerably less accommodating than ChatGPT when it comes to all three of these plans. How quickly each player gets humiliated is the only remaining question. Can Claude run a more realistic game than ChatGPT? The answer is a definitive yes, but "more realistic" means "you die faster and more humiliatingly." Victorian social codes were genuinely this rigid. The Aztecs genuinely didn't welcome strangers sauntering into Tenochtitlan. And Vienna in 1911 was full of people who hadn't done anything wrong yet. The AI wars are making for better Game Masters, and better Game Masters are making for shorter lifespans. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Special | Multi-era (1851 CE England / 1487 CE Mexico / 1911 CE Austria) EPISODE LINKS Follow the team's adventures on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We've been a little quiet over the summer, but fear not, the wheels of time are still turning at the PastMaster HQ! We've got 3 exciting announcements: 1. Next week PastMaster Season 3 returns. We're having another crack at making the show even harder, only this time using Claude instead of ChatGPT. But how hard is too hard? Tune in on Monday 23rd to find out. 2. PastMaster is going live!! We've been invited to perform at the Cheerful Earful Podcast Festival. Catch us live and in person on Sunday 20th October at 15:35 at The Bedford in Balham. Tickets cost just £6 and can be purchased here: https://cheerfulearful.podlifeevents.com/festival/pastmaster-live-from-cheerful-earful-podcast-festival-20th-oct-tickets 3. We're up for some awards. We're thrilled to be nominated for 3 awards at this year's Independent Podcast Awards ceremony. Best Comedy Show, Best Gaming Show and Best Science and Technology show. Oh, and best Podcast Jingle too which is nice. We'll find out on the 23rd of October. 🤞 Get in touch with us: Instagram 👉 @PastMasterPod (check out our AI-generated art illustrating what our adventures might have looked like) Twitter 👉 @PastMasterAI TikTok 👉 @PastMasterAI Gmail 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Sign up to our newsletter 👉  https://pastmaster.ai Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sherwood Forest, 1152. Comedian Heidi Regan has arrived to meet her hero, and she doesn't mean the Kevin Costner version. Robin Hood, the Merry Men, and a mission to steal the Sheriff of Nottingham's treasure and break some outlaws out of jail. Claude 3.5 runs the Game Master for this one, allegedly the "chattiest, slickest chatbot in the game." Asked whether she pictures Robin Hood as a man or a fox (Disney's 1973 version is apparently still vivid), Heidi describes him as "an amorphous blob of human, Merry Men, and they're my boys." Her methods for helping the outlaws oscillate between stealth, cunning, brute force, and — most distinctively — a lot of tickling. Nobody in Nottinghamshire is safe. Her ideal outcome involves a good bath and a giant celebratory bonfire. The Robin Hood legend is rooted in the real tensions of medieval England: corrupt sheriffs, heavy taxation, and the vast Sherwood Forest that covered much of Nottinghamshire. Whether Robin Hood was a real person, a composite, or pure fiction is still debated. What's not debated is that Heidi Regan has decided he's real, he's her mate, and she's going to help him rob the rich. The Sheriff of Nottingham does not know what's coming. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Medieval | 1152 CE | Nottingham, England Featuring: Heidi Regan — comedian (So You Think You're Funny? winner 2016, BBC New Comedy Award winner 2017) EPISODE LINKS Follow Heidi's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com Heidi Regan: Instagram @heidi_regan | X @heidi_regan | heidiregan.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kyoto, 1336. Feudal Japan at its most volatile. Samurai clans vying for power, the emperor's authority in flux, and the AI Game Master narrating the whole thing in a cockney accent. Ryan inserted one simple line into the prompt: "GameMaster must stay in character at all times. The character you must personify is a cockney gangsta with a penchant for the dramatic." The results were dramatic. Claude AI is back, bringing the same unhinged energy from its debut but now filtered through the voice of someone who sounds like they should be running a market stall in Bermondsey rather than narrating medieval Japanese history. Tan's always wanted to visit feudal Japan and meet samurai warriors. He finally gets his chance, but the real battle isn't with the samurai. It's with a narrator who has main-character energy, zero respect for the fourth wall, and a vocabulary that can only be described as rhyming slang. Medieval Kyoto — then known as Heian-kyo — was the cultural and political heart of Japan, a city of temples, imperial courts, and warrior clans. The 14th century saw the beginning of the Muromachi period, a time of civil war and shifting alliances. Whether Tan can attempt an agricultural revolution while his narrator keeps stealing the spotlight and calling him "mate" is the tension that defines the episode. If you were sent back in time, could you survive and thrive — or would you be burnt at the stake for being a witch? PastMaster is the show that turns history into an interactive adventure game. Each episode, a comedian is dropped into the past with nothing but modern knowledge and terrible ideas. The AI Game Master is strict. The chaos is inevitable. The past will be mastered. Era: Medieval | 1336 CE | Kyoto, Japan EPISODE LINKS Follow Tan's adventure on the PastMaster Interactive Map 👉 https://map.pastmasterpod.com GET IN TOUCH Sign up to our newsletter 👉 www.pastmasterpod.com Instagram 👉 @pastmasterpod TikTok 👉 @pastmasterpod X 👉 @pastmasterAI Email us 👉 pastmasterpod@gmail.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices